


the irish call it shamrock

by mimiofthemalfoys



Series: songs from the summer sea [1]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Abusive Relationships, Academia, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Heavy Angst, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Oh also, PLEASE READ TAGS, Physical Abuse, Unhealthy Relationships, also kids do drugs and stuff, and people talk about heavy shit in literature, if you are looking for healthy relationships please don't, it's chernobyl here everything's toxic, so please don't read on for fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-15
Updated: 2020-03-15
Packaged: 2021-02-28 21:20:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,116
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23143804
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mimiofthemalfoys/pseuds/mimiofthemalfoys
Summary: ned stark comes to learn the hard way that modernists know very little about love.
Relationships: Cersei Lannister/Ned Stark
Series: songs from the summer sea [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1666576
Comments: 9
Kudos: 36
Collections: ASOIAF Rarepair Week





	the irish call it shamrock

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the asoiaf rare pairs: a dream of spring challenge  
> day 1: prompt- false spring  
> yesterday night i came up with an angsty academia nedsei au and today i finished a nearly 8k word fic. for the sake of clarity, ned, cersei, robert, elia, arthur and alerie are all the same age, a couple of months give or take. also lyanna is dead.  
> PLEASE READ THE TAGS FOLKS.
> 
> (enjoy this fic that has no plot, no, not even a semblance of it. it's vaguely annoying actually)

**_“First we feel. Then we fall.”-_ ** **James Joyce, _Finnegan’s Wake,_ 1939**

Cersei says she won’t dream of it.

She says he is so very silly to talk such nonsense.

“In the cold?! Alone? Doing _what_?”

“Wanking,” says Robert.

“Huh,” says Ned.

“Robert,” says Cersei.

“Sorry,” says Robert, who doesn’t look sorry at all; sincere mortification, Ned has learnt in his two semi-productive years at Ainsley, comes last in a long list of emotions Robert has yet to master. “But you know it’s the truth, Suss. Never trust the brooding ones. Especially not in this gloomy ass weather. All kinds of unsanitary thoughts when left to themselves. Eliot in one hand, in the other-”

“Freud calls this projection.”

“We do have room,” Cersei interjects. “It’s a great old place. Can fit seven. On a good day.”

“I don’t want to third-wheel. And there’s a sixty five percent chance I will.”

“You _won’t_ -” she retorts angrily, but Robert breaks in with- “Couldn’t be the worst you’ve seen, Eduardo. Remember with the.... what was the name of that emo? The blue-haired one from visual arts? Diana?”

“Really, mate, I don’t fucking remember.” _Dyanna Clarick, first year, visual arts_. Her hair wasn’t blue- it was purple, although it had _looked_ blue alright in the hostile navy technicolour of the night lamp in their shared dorm when she and Rob had stumbled inside the room half-naked, junked up on sinsemilla and each other, after two hours of unappealingly frenzied grinding in the Samuel Beckett Hall. That was on the night of the Yule Party, and Ned had had to bury his face beneath three pillows and even so was only barely successful in drowning out the frenzied moaning.

Sometimes he regrets refusing to room with Arthur. Sharing the sleeplessness without the actual orgasm is just code for brain damage.

Not that he would ever.... No. Christ. Euphoric carnal feats aren’t his aesthetic. But still.

It’s just that every time he does this, every time he covers up for yet another of his best friend’s gross transgressions, he feels like he is committing a double edged breach of trust. Especially now, when he dares to look up and meet Cersei’s eyes-her strange, peerless green eyes-and see a flash of hurt there, just fleeting, as clean and quick in cut and draw as a deft surgical incision.

Robert notices her, notices Ned noticing her. And he laughs.

“ _Come on_ , the pair of you! What’s a guy to do!? I met her before I knew you, Suss. And it was...fuck’s sake, it meant nothing, okay? We were high, and it our first big uni night. I swear to god, I remember nothing, like, what was her name again?”

 _It was actually three months back,_ Ned wants to say. _You had a spat._

“You always say that.”

“One hundred percent. She could be right here in this hall and I wouldn’t know.”

 _You told me Suss is a stone-cold bitch with an ego as big as Greenland_.

“Right here?!”

“Suss. Lovely Suss. I could be humping the old hallway statue for all I know. That’s how high I was. Yeah, sounds about right. Bobby B getting off against The Bust of Robert Burns.”

_I mean, she is pretty and all. But you notice, she’s like, so fucking frigid? It’s a little- hate to use that word, man- a bit of a turn-off._

These are the secrets Ned carries with him.

It scares him sometime. The dichotomy.

Of holding on... or letting go.

Either way, he’d be the one to blame.

But then Cersei scrunches her nose at Rob, and he pulls his bambi-eyed expression of ~~condescending~~ conciliatory affection and taps her nose, the tip of it, and then she giggles, running a hand through his thick black curls, _god you’re so stupid,_ and he goes _yeah I love you too_ and then they do whatever couples do and Ned thinks, sorting his salad into little piles, really, is it even worth the trouble.

* * *

Ainsley was built in 1932, after St. Peter’s, but before St. Cross (back when Pearl Harbour was unbombed and Sylvia Plath was unborn ~~and Christian Dior was unboned~~ ). It is primarily a liberal arts college, co-ed, since ‘69 (never unmentioned or uncelebrated on campus nights of the good, good Irish intoxication), fifty three acres of verdant quadrangles and decorated gardens and stone archways and lattices leached by June humidity. Old libraries that smell like fungicide and leather. A choir under Adam and Eve’s. Things that find their way into brochures, glossy illustrations with ugly yellow lettering, spelling out bald statistics.

There are things that don’t merit a résumé in the brochure though, and those are what Ned likes best about Ainsley. A juniper visible from his dorm window, for example, fleshy berries littering the ground beneath on certain days. The mist that might sneak in and curl the yellow edges of library books if you left a window open on October evenings. How light can play through stain glass, viewed from the right angle in the Cedar Chapel, sometime before sunrise.

He loathes that word- which is ironic, given his subject of study- but there’s something vaguely romantic about it all.

Robert calls it an _edgelord’s guide to self-imposed exile,_ which, in some ways is true, what with the whole tweed-coats-and-button-downs-and-existential-substance-abuse mentality, six hundred strong. But Ned doesn’t mind. He likes the existential. ~~He likes the substance abuse too. Sometimes.~~ and while he’s unsure what it’s like in political science-Rob’s department, _I_ _was conned into social sciences, mate, abso-fuckass-lutely conned,_ he is reminded every Saturday over beers-Ned feels like he has never experienced such profound contentment in his adolescence, back in their dingy Welsh bungalow ( _home_ : a stoic dad, oversmiling mum, three siblings and an old fat Lab, plus five hundred flyers from the neighbourhood donation drive and ceiling fans whirring to wake the dead), as he does here. Here, cooped up in the departmental library with Elia and Arthur and the rest of his mates in the English department, ties loosened, fingers black-and-blue in both senses of the word, trying to finish a thesis paper on delayed salvation in Eliot’s Ariel Poems.

_What seas what shores what grey rocks and what islands. What water lapping the bow, and scent of pine and the woodthrush singing through the fog._

_What images return._

And then of course, oh _she_.

* * *

_When he thinks back to the summer he turned twelve, the memory that shines out in absolute clarity is this: starbursts of light in clear plastic wrap._

_The plastic wrap was Joanna’s. The room across the second floor landing was Jaime’s. And when the younger children were out on the beach, doing younger children things like pressing starfish on arm hair to see if it would really leave a starfish-shaped hairless patch when you yanked it off, when the hallways were alight and sizzling in the late afternoon heat, golden and brown, the world was theirs._

_That day however, he had seen green._

_Green, like he’d never known the colour._

_Noon, hot. Jaime was playing a complicated game of tag with Benjen and Lyanna on the rocks -Lyanna! And, oh, the difference to me! –while their mothers were out in the garden, salty haired, eyes full of sea and sun. They were upstairs alone, the pair of them, and she had told him-with all the confidence that only Cersei had-that she was going to make a kaleidoscope from memory. Between themselves, they had divided the tasks of taping the toothpaste tube, cutting the cardboard, selecting spangled stars and confetti._

_I wish I had a proper prism, she had lamented while he tried to construct a neat triangle from the folded tube. And a really strong glue gun. Dad won’t let me near the glue gun._

_Neither does my dad. I heard it burns you._

_Well he let Jaime use it! I saw it when we were pasting the little mirrors on the cabinet for Mom._

_Maybe he trusts Jaime more._

_Cersei pouted. Her eyebrows were slightly darker than the pure unbound gold of her hair. And her eyes were green, like everybody else’s in their family, but when the sun fell on the right side of their faces he could see gold swirls around the bright green of her irises._

_Whatever boys can do, I can do better, she sulked._

_I don’t think so._

_You’re just jealous._

_No I’m not._

_You are._

_She began to ferociously slice out a circle of plastic wrap. I can run and tackle and dodge better than Jaime at all the games. I’m smarter too. Someday I’ll get away from here, go study in a fancy university. And Jaime will be doing stupid stuff._

_Like what?_

_I don’t know. Writing rock songs._

_She had made herself giggle at the idea. In the stillness of the afternoon he was already halfway in love._

_But I don’t think I can pee in the woods. That’s just something boys do better._

_You’re so weird. Look at this._

_He had held up the finished kaleidoscope for her to see then. It wasn’t very refined work-the dried glue had made yellow patches across the cardboard and sticky pieces of wrap jutted from the mouths of the tube. But then when she pulled down the blinds and darkened the room, when he held up a flashlight at the other end and Cersei’s eyes were pure green fire in sudden supernovic shots and the room was spinning all strange and she grinned, how fancy! Look Ned, we did it! - it didn’t matter. Not Jaime or the future or the inexactness of memory, nothing of anything mattered anymore._

* * *

In the beginning it seemed like a classic case of Being The Scapegoat. On the university bus, or in Robert’s apartment, or in the back row of the conference room, he came to recognize how luck operates and how fortune favours the beautiful and how _things fall apart_ and the _centre cannot hold_.

_He seems nice._

_What’s his name?_

_He’s rather handsome. Properly handsome._

Robert he’d known all his life. From the first day at kindergarten, when a three year old with very round blue eyes had plopped down next to him, no doubt taking pity on the tiny owlish specimen with the scruffy hair and tired eyes, had placed one half of a tuna sandwich on Ned’s plate and had announced, “You can call me Rob. Eat that.”

They were more brothers than he had been with Benjen and Brandon. Every single spring of his early childhood was a series of Polaroids, the three of them: science planetarium on the first Sunday of every month for the new shows, with red popsicles for him and blue ones for Lyanna and Rob, the tree fort that Cassie had built them on a dead birch, drawstrings and elastic bands put on common clothes, dragonflies settling on Lyanna’s knees as they fake duelled with water guns in the backyard.

But then Robert had been packed off to some boarding school in Swansea when he turned ten and the Lannisters had moved in next door the very next summer, a bit on the richer side to be sure, but _very nice folk alright_ and the winter had barely turned before Ned was up and awake at seven on a Saturday, racing down the beach to Cersei’s, and spring had barely come before they had swum out to a cove and she had cut herself on fire coral and laughed it off and Ned had decided he was most decidedly going to fall in love because it didn’t seem so bad after all.

Robert had resurfaced when they were sixteen, and a microcosmic Shakespearean tragedy had unfolded in the little cul-de-sac along Cardiff Bay. Ned holding in his breath every time a stray lock of Cersei’s hair fell obstinately upon her nose and she would blow it, like some 1950s cigarette model. Cersei nervously laughing a bit too much, a bit too loud every time Robert made a largely unfunny joke about girls getting ready. Robert blustering and dropping the plate of cherries Cassie had told him to distribute from if Lyanna grinned at him, all boyish haircut and skinned knees and squirrel-sharp eyes. Lyanna messing up Jaime’s hair, fiercely defending him in quarrels, bursting into tears the day he got into a harmless little accident involving spiced rum and a Harley Davidson. (that’s it. End of circle. Nothing more to see. Jaime was a narcissist, not a Sweet Home Alabama type of guy. Or for that matter, in love with Ned.)

It was all really bittersweet, even funny, in that faux-deep, neon-lit indie film way about teenagers getting wasted and just swelling up like water balloons with their need for emotional venting. That is until that night, when Lyanna took it too far- _stupid, stupid, Lyanna, reckless, wide-hearted Lyanna_ \- and his mother was shouting, and the neighbours came rushing into their house at four in the dawn, and an ashen-faced Cersei pulled a sobbing Benjen away into her arms and _jesus fucking christ_ it hurt to look at Robert and Cassie was hugging his mother and crying and everybody was crying and just, ambulances and water and _noise, noise, noise_.

Everything came apart.

Everybody, really.

Then, as with all things it passed. It took some time. But it passed.

One year and five months later, Robert and Cersei began dating. Two months after that, they filled out their college forms. And seven weeks later, the beach still empty and grey in the early light, when Cersei ran out of her house screaming, acceptance letter in hand - hair billowing out like a halo, still in yoga pants and chunky tee-and flew right into Ned’s arms- _we’ll all be together! I can’t breathe!-_ he just accepted the inevitable and hugged her back, wishing he could unlove her.

It was everywhere, the longing. Selfish and unexplainable and disgustingly unbecoming.

* * *

He goes because she asks him to.

He knows he comes off as a bit of a snob, to his siblings: extroverts, the pack of them, and to the Modernism study group too, except Elia maybe, and that’s mostly because they had worked together on a paper for _Station Island_ and later gotten high, daringly, in the library washroom. But he’s not _that_ much of a snob. First year, he fell asleep of sheer boredom during a seminar on the Japanese influence in Ezra Pound’s writing ( _You missed nothing_ , Elia had later assured him, _we needed the certificate and who cares about that pro-Hitler wanker anyway_.), and he is pretty vocal about art films being largely pretentious in the name of depth. So when Cersei accosts him on the east quadrangle, and begs him to accompany her to some documentary about Louis Lumière at the atrium, he hesitates for a heartbeat.

“I have an assignment.”

“On _what_?”

“Dubliners.”

“UGH. Bring your books along.”

“You know it doesn’t work that way.”

“Please? I’m all alone. Robert has a presentation on Saturday, you know.” She pulls a ridiculous, cartoony sad face, and if it was just about any other living, breathing entity on campus Ned would take religious measures to never cross paths with them again.

But.

It’s Cersei.

He knows she loves this stuff.

And when Cersei talks about things she loves, she _glows_.

“I’ll think about it,” he says.

“So that’s a yes?”

“Jesus. I said I’ll think ab-”

“It’s like....it’s so awfully interesting, you know? Like everybody talks about Edison-but, this one, this patent didn’t need a projector! It was almost portable and handy for large screenings! And they used a _borosilicate condenser_!”

Not for the first time he notices how her irises literally spark when she is passionate about something. Bright flashing emerald on the outside and then flecks of gold round the pupil.

It’s like holding up an emerald to the sun. You don’t see how it fucking _burns_ green till the light gets in.

“I’ll see. I hate working on Joyce.”

“Okay then, Saturday, 5 pm, Atrium. Take the big stairway, the one by the gallery. I’ll be there.”

“Cersei-”

“Thanks, you’re a peach, Eddard,” she grins, blows him a kiss like a halfway gun salute _(oh no)_ and flits away as quickly as she’d come, a blur of red on a bright viridian field. Ned realises he’s smiling like a total ass.

He will keep her waiting, but it’s kind of useless, seeing as to how both know what his answer will be.

 _Fie, fie, you crush me_. Oh lord.

* * *

They sit in the farthest row, the kind of seats usually reserved for activities that would seem more amorous by dim lighting. Ned complains it’s the worst arrangement he could think of for revising notes. Cersei ruffles his hair and tells him to be quiet, and then spends the rest of the hour-and-half pelting peanuts at the ginger from socio, sitting two rows ahead of them and sacrilegiously yawning _at all the best bits like a cretin,_ or so Cersei says, he would never know.

“So you’re coming with us,” she concludes, as the screen darkens to simulate a Lumière film roll. “Rob insists.”

“What about you?”

“Don’t be silly, I’m going of course.”

“I meant, do you insist too?”

She starts at that and then, turning to gauge his expression, smiles at him. _She has an Alicia Silverstone smile._ That’s all Ned is capable of articulating mentally. “You’re such a baby. I don’t mind. I’m not someone who resents if their partner brings along some friends.”

 _That’s really not what I meant._ But he takes it.

“And what if you both need privacy for some Juno-in-the-clouds?”

“Moron.”

“Legitimate question.”

“Huh.” She stops swinging her legs. “I’m not. No. I don’t know what you’ve seen Eduardo, but we won’t be frisking around and leaving you to mooch off in dark corners. Sorry to disappoint.”

“Sounds really romantic to me.”

“What?”

“Going to a country house and just...sitting around. I don’t know. Playing chess or something. In the height of l’amour season.”

“Well I’m not fucking him anymore.”

“Oh, woah, easy.” He tries to lighten the mood, pats her hair mock-seriously. “What happened, _Suss_? Another spat? Again?”

“No.”

“Well?”

“I-look let’s just watch this fucking film in peace okay? We’re being that noisy pair at the theatre and I hate it. You made me miss the part about the screen perforations.”

So they do. He goes back to his book. The voiceover in the film drones on. She leans her head against his shoulder, her hair shining in the darkness of the hall. Ned is aware peculiarly, of a strange hum at the back of his head.

Just before the lights flick on, Cersei whispers, her head still against his shoulder, “If you do wish to know, I _hate_ that name. _Suss._ I hate it.”

* * *

“No, no, read that again.”

_“Orion dipped his foot into the water. Alive and violated, they lay on their beds of ice: bivalves: the split bulb... and philandering sigh of the ocean.”_

_“_ Assault.”

“Yes.”

“Disgusting.”

“Yes.”

“ _Ripped and shucked and scattered_. Really. Men will get the Nobel for concocting any ghettoising bullshit.”

“You might include that in the footnote. Ms. Edgerton is a misandrist. Good for the CGPA.”

“Bleh. That’s Heaney for you. A masterclass in making female readers squeamish.”

“Well, if it’s of any consolation, I’m pretty squeamish myself.”

“That’s because you’re usually a decent man.”

“Usually?!” Ned laughs and shakes Cersei off his back- _what a precarious position to assume while comparing inter-textual analyses anyway_ \- “Here I thought we were becoming best mates.”

“Haha. You’re really sweet. That is when you’re not sticking up for Rob, you know.”

“So this is about Rob, after all.”

“Isn’t it _always_ about Rob?” just an edge of annoyance to her voice. He feels her shift against the arm of the couch, and then the jut of her elbow as she rests her book upon his back. “Have you had time to think?”

“Why are you so insistent upon my tagging along? I thought, and I quote directly from your own definition, that I’m a _funsponge_?”

“I was drunk that night.”

“As always. That’s another thing, by the way. I wouldn’t be holding back any of your hair. I swear. I’ll take the car and head straight back on the M50.”

“Eddard, on my honour-and I know I have none-but hypothetically, on my honour, we aren’t going to make you clean puke out of Victorian carpets. Promise. We just want a sane, respectable, well-balanced individual with us.”

“Designated driver _and_ couple counsellor. Lovely.”

Cersei nuzzles her face against his back and he shrugs her off, fake impatiently, starting to feel a strange case of domino towers in his ribs. “Don’t be a hedgehog, Neddard.”

“ _Neddard_?!”

“Ed. Edward. Eduardo. Eddie. Sweetheart.”

“Oh god, you never give up, do you? I’ll see if I can get Elia to cover for me a couple of days. But this is the last time. The only time.”

Cersei smooshes her face into his spine again. There’s just a paper-thin boundary between discretion and disloyalty- _on god, I can’t_ -that he skates for a millisecond before she raises her head, grinning like the Cheshire cat. _What an evil woman_.

“You could have told me about Dyanna Clarick, you know,” she says.

* * *

_It’s good that you’re going, says Robert._

_It wouldn’t have been fun being holed up all day in a gloomy old house listening to Suss blabber about....fucking.....oh, Ban-my-ass or something._

_Bahnhofstrasse._

_Yeah, that._

_They pack, and Ned notices with mounting dread the suspiciously large ice-box Robert draws from the kitchen. Slow down mate, he says, trying to strike a balance between concerned pal and frustrated older brother._

_Don’t worry about me, Eddie. Worry about Suss. She can’t keep down her fucking drink. The other night at Alerie’s gig she got high as a kite after two rounds, threw up on me and said she wanted to be a pair of claws and scuttle on the sea floor. Holy fucking shit._

_That’s an allusion._

_What?_

_Like a literary reference. Prufock._

_What the flying fuck is that?_

_It’s a poem by Eliot._

_Oh, you fucking nerds. You think it’s cute but you’ll see. God, that girl sets me on edge. Pretty as a picture, no doubt, but Baba Yaga underneath all that stuff. To think I was the one who planned the first date._

_Starting to wish you hadn’t?_

_A pause._

_Eh. She’s alright. You know. She takes care of me._

_And more is there to say? They work in silence, and then Rob says, Do you ever- and catches himself guiltily._

_Spit it._

_Do you ever, you know....Christ- I’m not good at this, like, resent me for moving on from her?_

_He doesn’t mention it but Ned imagines that in his mind, Robert imbues the H with a capitalised halo. He winces. You’re being stupid._

_Good. I mean. Sorry. But good. You know._

_Yeah._

_I like Suss. I don’t get the girl, but I do like her._

_Another pause, and then Ned finally says, as if coming to terms with the strangeness of it all- yeah me too. And what’s funny is this, Robert: I do get her._

* * *

There’s heavy fog the day they set out. Robert loads their bags in the car, and his huge goddamn ice-box, brushing off Ned’s attempts to help.

“Don’t flatter yourself. I have seen you trip on air carrying five library books.”

“Such depressing weather,” Cersei bemoans from the backseat. “I thought it would be sunny by the lake.”

“When is it ever sunny around here anyway,” comes the reply from the trunk. Ned walks round to the front of the car, to where Cersei is squashed between two large suitcases. She looks tiny. Her bright green scarf covers her mouth and half of her nose, her hair is tucked into a gold teddy coat, and her eyes look greener than usual, which, he realises, is because of some glittery stuff she has applied on her eyelids.

“Like it?”

“What?”

“The eyeshadow. I presume that’s what you’re staring at anyway. The Irish call it shamrock, you know.”

“Um. Yeah. Sure. It’s very.... _green_?” he craves death.

Robert bellows from the back, “He’s being nice, Suss. I was right; it makes you look like a leprechaun!”

Cersei flushes angrily, but Ned thinks as he watches her- it’s rather wrong. Analogical error. Rhetorical error actually, to think of her as anything, simply _anything_ other than disturbingly beautiful, even with the teddy coat, even with the sleep-mussed skin, more so, actually.

Robert walks round to the front, gets in, and slams the door shut. “ _Are we ready_?!” he honks like an excitable party host on karaoke night.

“Yes MJ _,”_ Ned deadpans.

From the backseat, he is bestowed with a tiny, tinkly laugh. _Evil woman. Lady Macbeth. Shamrock green poison eyes._ But he laughs too and dares to look back at her in the rear-view.

It’s going to be a long week.

* * *

_Back in first year, when they’d been studying Door into the Dark, Cersei had told him about the cult of Nerthus. She had described to him the bog goddess, her neck ring representing the feminine principle-grounded cycle of creation, destruction and regeneration, disrupted only by war- “the most masculinised of all concepts, as it goes”-and how the very heart of the Celt tradition had thrived off the bog-land. Some things just need to be left alone by men, some patterns of behaviour best left unspoiled so as not to change the balance._

_Sometimes when Robert is really, really drunk, he gets angry. Angry at himself, also at his parents, at Ned, at Cersei. But mostly at Lyanna._

_Sometimes when Cersei is really, really drunk, she gets upset. Upset at herself, also at her parents, at her brother, at Rob and Ned. But mostly at Lyanna._

_Ned pulls Robert out into the street and holds on to him while he throws up at the base of the old statue of Marlowe, a replica of the collection in Canterbury. Anger he can deal with. Robert’s anger is red and it simmers and sizzles and he buries his rage into some pretty young thing from one of the sorority houses and by morning is satiated, sombre and serene._

_About Cersei he is not so sure._

_The one time both Rob and Cersei get drunk at the same time, Ned is so tired that he calls Arthur and Elia to come haul his friend off under their wing. He puts Cersei to bed, Robert’s bed actually, limp as a mermaid caught in a trawler’s net. Shifts her pillows so she can’t asphyxiate herself or some stupid shit like that, leaves pills and water and a large bucket which Elia agrees to sacrifice with the air of a martyr. But as he is about to get into his own bed, she groans from underneath the blanket and he is at her side, propping the bucket._

_“Don’t wanna puke.”_

_“Okay. Want some water?”_

_“No. You get in this bed.”_

_“Go to sleep Cersei. You’re dead drunk.”_

_“Get in.”_

_“I’m not having sex with you.”_

_“BRR. I didn’t say that. I want a bolster.”_

_He scoffs at that but the thing about Cersei Lannister is, she usually ends up having her way._

_The next day, when he opens his eyes, she’s gone but Elia is there and she is looking at him all suspicious._

_“No, we didn’t.”_

_“Small blessings.”_

_He finds her later in the library, dark circles beneath her eyes, hair dirty. A tabloid heroine. Marilyn complex._

_She thanks him and at first he brushes her off-not the first time, not the last time-but then she says, “I really needed to feel held for some time,” and the niceties kind of die away._

_He doesn’t tell her what he’s seen. She doesn’t need to know that when he helped her undress for the night, he had seen on her china-white arm a purple welt, rising like a paper accordion. Harsh. Ugly. Fresh._

* * *

For the first four days, everything goes unsettlingly well.

No one gets drunk. Well, Robert does. But only slightly. A little genial tipsiness never harmed anyone. They go visit the apple orchards, the distillery too and the spring in the air is as lovely as a song. Cersei gathers shiny rocks from the shallowest parts downriver.

“For your kaleidoscope?” he jokes.

“Why not?”

She glosses her lips dark berry red. And wears her hair up.

He thinks in words, _terza rima, allegory, iconography._

Rob complains it’s beginning to feel like a monastic expedition, so they smoke proper, urbane cigarettes and speak of proper urbane things like the one time they’d caught Brandon fucking a girl in the shack where the children down the bay street usually hid illegally obtained treasures, the usual: dead jellyfish and beach glass and bathing caps.

Ned gets browner and his eyes look even more washed-out against his skin than before. Cersei gets more golden and impossibly, more radiant. Robert gets analytical.

“I think Seamus Heaney was a furry,” Rob says.

“Jesus Christ, man.”

“Think about it. He got off to cattle mating. He calls his wife a skunk-”

“A rare example of a postmodern conceit!”

“Dude, this is a _skunk_. I couldn’t write a poem about Suss, calling her an-oh, say, a lovely female dachshund?”

“You mean a bitch,” Cersei states flatly.

“In coarser terms, yes?”

“I don’t think you could write a poem to save your life,” she retorts, and while she’s calm, Ned feels that strange hum again, like the room is full of invisible bugs, skirting in and out of their heads.

“Well, frankly Suss,” Robert says, the smile never leaving his face. “Maybe you’re right. For _you_ I won’t.”

* * *

_There are some cycles worse than Nerthus’ ring._

_When Ned looks up from his book, he sees them at the other end of their quadrangle, sprawled beneath a stone lion, legs and arms in a tangle. Cersei’s head is in Rob’s lap and she’s reading something out to him, Book 5 of the Iliad maybe, their favourite, Diomedes’ aristeia._

_Aristeia. A sudden exhibit of glory. Triumph._

_Cersei says something, something sharp and sweet, and Rob laughs out loud- sincerely, that’s what’s worst- kissing the top of her honeyed head._

_Ned feels sick._

_They belong in Beverly Hills, you know, Elia tells him. Not on College Greens. What a fucking pair._

_You don’t know the half of it, he replies loyally. She just guffaws at that. Sure, whatever lets you sleep at night._

_Sometimes, he thinks, Elia knows everything._

_The thought of it terrifies him._

* * *

They are at it. Again. _Fucking 21 st century Zeus and Hera. _Their voices rise and fall in the parlour downstairs.

Zeus and Hera.

It’s an idea, though. Food for thought.

Something crashes, splinters. A door slams. Alarmed, Ned jumps out of bed, practically bolting downstairs.

* * *

_One Thursday, they had the entire wing to themselves. There was a party that evening, some fall fundraiser event, but Cersei was sick and he was apathetic to fundraisers. So they were alone. The air, rarefied, needling outside, mellower indoors, still beneath their coarse blankets._

_Do you think Sufjan Stevens sings about sex or about God? she asked him._

_Oh, I hardly think it’s that black-and-white. Maybe it’s both._

_Church and screwing?_

_Surprisingly, yes. Love and surrender to a partner can often be scandalously contrasted by the same refuge in spiritual frenzy_.

_I love Seven Swans, she had said impulsively. Do you want to hear a song?_

* * *

_Rob is gone._

Relief is sometimes more brutally honest than confrontation.

Relief shreds clean whatever one tries to sew into the back of the mind.

That’s what Ned realises, as it floods into him: he is glad, glad of the silence, glad he doesn’t have to face Rob when he goes downstairs.

Cersei looks ashy; she’s shaking. He doesn’t move from his spot at the other corner of the room. “Are you hurt?”

“No. I’m fine.”

“You can tell me.”

“It’s alright. You should try to call him. He might do something.”

Quickly he assesses the room. No books flung, nothing heavy misplaced; the coffee table is upturned, shattered, but it was a flimsy affair, living on borrowed time anyway. “I’ll call Arthur,” he says, face burning with embarrassment and leaves the room. Too ashamed of the part he plays in this. Too weak to stand by, unable to console, unable to help her or hold her while she weeps.

* * *

_Maybe Sufjan himself didn’t know what he sang of._

_I'd swim across Lake Michigan, I'd sell my shoes, I'd give my body to be back again, in the rest of the room._

_What did that even mean? He wasn’t religious._

_But then when she began to sing along, off-key, warbling the notes on purpose to cover her self-consciousness, he felt a sliver of faith after all._

_Checkmate there, Joyce._

_He’d been falling all his life, but only that day, cursed with hideous music and lamplight flickering in green eyes, did he feel._

* * *

He takes her to the lake, and on the way he points out beds of monastic stones. “They have these in Lough Derg, just larger and more frequent intervals, you know.”

“Have you been?”

“No, not recently. My dad took us to St. Patrick’s when I was very little. Don’t remember much.”

“They say it’s haunted.”

“Well that’s like cent percent folklore. A combination of myth and anecdote.”

In the dark, hidden by shadows, he hadn’t seen it all.

Now, in daylight though, it’s an exercise in avoidance. He keeps his eyes to the ground.

Unseeingly however this remains: purple paper accordions, springing up like mushrooms on skin. One around her throat. One at the corner of her mouth.

_Lyanna, how you fled!_

Cersei moves closer to him. Their shoulders brush. Eventually she takes his left arm and slings it round her neck.

“She’s here,” she says softly, almost afraid of some unseen trespasser in this woodland. “Your sister. She won’t stay with us, but she won’t let us go.”

* * *

Rob doesn’t answer the call, not on the first ring, or even the fourth. Eventually Ned realises he is being dumb, and just dials Elia instead.

“I saw him yesterday night. Looked _bad_. He was with Taliya from history. I think they...went back to your room.”

“Oh, great.”

“Weren’t you guys supposed to go on holiday or something?”

He doesn’t respond.

“Hey, Eddard?” Elia sounds irritated, but not unkind. “Between you and me: don’t fucking get involved. These are messed up folk.”

* * *

On the drive back, Ned becomes keenly aware of things one can only notice in dead silence. Inconsequential things. Signs on the motorway drenched by dusk rain. Fraying leather on the seat covers. Dyanna’s holographic hair elastic in Rob’s glove compartment.

Cersei lies on the backseat, static. Her bruises look worse now, and he knows she keeps worrying them.

At a gas station, they get into the single graffiti coated bathroom stall together and he makes her sit still against the grimy sink so he can get a proper look.

Ned hates having to pretend, but he feels like, he feels....so _clueless_ about where to take this charades game next, so he bullshits anyway, “So this is the first time?”

She doesn’t answer. It cuts more. If she had shouted, he would’ve internalised that as his punishment. Instead, the silence. It’s kinder, also crueller.

“Cersei?”

“Ssh. I am trying to be angry.”

They stay still for some more time. Cersei’s jaw getting tighter, and tighter, and then he says, “You can.”

She trembles suddenly, like a spasmodic fit.

And then she begins to cry. Violently. Her body shakes so hard he has a sudden crazy feeling she’s going to splice in half like a tree in a lighting storm. For the first time, the external act of crying seems to him as painful as the torrent within.

 _Fuck it_ , he thinks, and pulls her into his arms. She lets him.

She is so small. He had always thought of eulogized beloveds in broad terms- _statuesque, ethereal, wild-eyed_ \- but she is in his hold, and she is _small_. He holds her tighter, until her skin is flush against his, pries her fingers open to see the barbed red grids on her palm, the chipped paint from her nails. He thinks of the scarves she always wears wrapped tight around her neck, the high collared dresses she favours even in July, and he feels like retching.

“God,” Cersei whimpers. “I want to be angry, I’ll _die_ if I’m not angry. But I can’t. He stole my rage from me.”

 _Have you had time to think_?-she’d asked. Over and over and over again.

And Ned, Ned thinks of water splashing, and sirens, and the screams downstairs, and he thinks of lying, and lying again- _I don’t really know Cersei_ \- and wishes he could be unborn.

* * *

For the remainder of the way, she sits upright again, starts talking. Pours and pours out everything he has already known, about Lyanna and the drinking and the mutually selfish hoarding of grief. She tells him about other things too, things he wouldn’t dream of asking- the way she is left dirtied and biting her tongue to keep down the sobs every time they fuck, the way he insisted on keeping the lights out, on both of them getting drunk like _a bloody_ _Leicester Square hook-up_.

_It’s like I’m the ghost and she’s the girl._

Ned listens. Reliving everything once more. Gripping her hand till the knuckles turn white. _I know, I know, I know_.

“He lives in the past,” she hisses, “he can’t move on.”

Then he says it. Because he is aching to. Because it was _his_ sister who died that night.

“But Cersei, haven’t you done the same? There’s nothing there anymore!”

The words are out, before he can clamp his teeth; they are out in the air, and they are everywhere. Cersei pulls away from his grip, her hand drops. There’s ice in both of them.

“Alright,” she says. “Let’s go back to campus.”

And just like that, spring is dead.

* * *

He lets himself go.

It’s not for him, their world. Too convoluted. Too...( _goddamn Elia_ ) Beverly Hills.

To Joyce it is.

* * *

Cersei leaves a note for him when he’s at the cafeteria.

_I’m not angry. I just wish, of all the times I hoped you would be honest with me, that hadn’t been the one._

He lets it be. Heads down to the coordinator for new slots. Finishes his paper.

“Music is at once what tethers them together, it is also however what alienates Gabriel Morkan from his family, this loss of legacy.”

“You don’t hang around with those two lately,” Elia says.

“Yes, and?”

“Nothing. Ease up.” She pats his arm. “Let it be.”

Ned can’t. But what’s new about that.

* * *

In odd moments, he finds himself thinking about the gold flecks in Cersei’s green gaze.

What a funny little detail.

Also how she insisted on wearing something green at all times. Top-to-toe or a single earring. Rob would say she had breathed in too much Irish air.

He avoids them like the plague now. Robert and Cersei. Too much to accomplish, not enough time to self-doubt and fall behind.

* * *

When term lets out, they find themselves horrifically free. Galway is gorgeous at the height of spring, or so his friends insist. Ned lets Arthur drag him along.

It _is_ kind of gorgeous. Someone’s uncle owns a summer house and they make a raid of the length of it. Alerie gets drunk and Ashara tries to drown her. Arthur decides to lose his virginity, and then wisely desists. Elia gets a little rush out of revealing she is a lesbian to each new hopeful guy at each new bar. They toast their futures over melting ices and someone brings out more beers.

At Silverstrand, he sees an old man with a zoetrope and a kaleidoscope. A gaggle of tourists stand by while their kids borrow pennies to drop into his tea-can and get a minute-long peek into mirrored colours, to paper silhouettes dancing round a light.

When the zoetrope man approaches him, Ned looks at the tea-can and smiles at him. But not too kindly, so as not to be mistaken for a potential customer.

The sea roars. It does taste a bit like the salty Pleiades.

* * *

On the last night at Galway, Ashara asks him if he wants to go out somewhere. “I mean, like, in private.”

“Oh.” The nightclub leaves no space between bodies, and strobe lights make his head spin. “No. Fuck- I mean, I’m sorry. I don’t feel very well.”

“Yeah alright,” her mouth sets in a thin line and she begins to inch back into the crowd.

“It’s the strobe lights,” he calls out stupidly.

He thinks about shamrock green, and it calms him, and then he thinks of Cersei, Cersei in the water, Cersei in the red dress, Cersei’s soft magnolia arms.

It’s not helping.

* * *

They meet outside college grounds, in a little eatery by the south gate.

“I’m sorry,” Robert says finally, after twenty minutes of browbeating and aimless placations.

“Yeah, I know the drill.”

“No, I am, really! Seriously.” When Rob is anxious, he drums his fingers a lot. “I’m fucking sorry about the night-”

“It’s not just the _one_ night, you know-”

“AND the bruises and the drink. I know, I know, it’s a mess, I’m a mess.” He runs his hand through his hair, his eyes red-rimmed and watery, and Ned thinks he’s never looked worse. He almost feels sorry again. Almost.

“Why don’t you try to pull this off before the person you _actually_ tried to strangle?!”-he must’ve gotten too loud, a couple of diners turn round to stare disapprovingly. Robert is red, in rage and hurt.

“She won’t listen to me.”

“Well there’s your answer.”

“But can you-”

“No.” he gets up, grabs his coat. “Get an appointment with a counsellor. Call Cassie. Or both.”

Robert stares in disbelief. “What, you don’t want to listen now? Your best friend, Ned?! Because I _disrespected_ Suss-”

“Don’t call her that; she hates it.”

“-oh I’ll call her whatever the bloody hell I want. You fighting for her now?”

“ _Christ_.” Ned stops. “It’s not Cersei. Not just her anyway.”

Rob falters.

“What you do is degrading to my sister’s memory. Lyanna killed herself because she was depressed. And I think her passing, however horrible it was, needs to be about her. Not you. So for fuck’s sake, Robert stop making Lya’s suicide an excuse for you behaving like an arse to your girlfriend.”

He leaves, without waiting for a reaction. For a few horrible moments, it feels as if he might vomit, or worse, begin to cry. But then it begins to recede, that terrible overwhelming feeling within.

By the time Ned’s back in his dorm to collect his things, he feels like a patient cured of a tumour.

* * *

On his table, green ink on chalk-white stationery- _where, o where art thou?_

Another note: _why don’t you talk to me anymore? What have I done?_

It’s the last tremulous interrogation mark that breaks him.

* * *

He finds her alone in her room. It’s a clear twilight in March, and the pink walls glow lavender. Her bookshelves are stripped too, and her baggage line the wall, a row of pretty, jewel-coloured trolley bags. She hasn’t removed her mirror-ball yet though, or the pictures of her friends on the corkboard.

“I had an argument with Robert today.”

“I broke up with him.”

“Really ( ~~good relief, bad friend~~ )?! That’s excellent!”

Maybe his joy is too palpable? She stares at him, and he wonders if she wonders. Because of all the problems he’s fixed up for the two of them, that would be the worst, the most unthinkable. _How to deal with this._

“Sit.”

So he does.

“Listen.”

So he does.

Waiting.

The purple deepens until Ned wonders if her walls were ever pink at all. Outside, the glass starts to fog.

Cersei walks to the window, latches it. She returns to him, places her palms upon his shoulders. “We won’t talk about this again,” she says. Ned wants to kiss her. “but before we leave, I’m sorry for the things I said. About Lyanna. I was so... I was in pain, and I didn’t think about you.”

“As I’m sorry. For Clarick.” _But also for other things_. “For not sticking up more often. For you, I mean.” _For noticing and then pretending to leave things unnoticed._

She nods, and then she tilts her head, and _gods,_ she’s infuriatingly lovely.

“That little verse about Ixion, I found it charming. But you were unsubtle about the references.”

Nononono. “Where did you-?!”

“You left it in the glove compartment. Along with Clarick’s hair elastic. At least I think it’s Clarick’s. Every single one of you are shameless, you know?”

“God, I’m-” it would’ve been the lowest point of humiliation in his life but then Cersei Lannister goddamn _pulls_ his face to her and kisses him.

_It’s the tilt of the roof. It’s the tacky polish on her nails._

_She. She does it first._

They break apart and after ages and ages of missing the sea-smelling room of their childhood, he sees starbursts in Cersei’s eyes again. Seconds prolong for just the wrong amount of time and the air grows awkward between them. “I just-felt like,” when Cersei is embarrassed, she has the tiniest lilt to her voice. “I mean. It wasn’t anything. You don’t have to.”

_It’s the waiting the friction the spring the twilight the gold and the deep-deep green._

So he kisses her back.

* * *

The end of spring.

Galway again. But this time, he is alone.

It’s that strange time of the year, suspended between half winter-mornings and half-summer days. The coastline is clear. Morning mist. No bathers around, yet.

It makes him smile. He had never imagined parting could make him smile.

_You always look so sad. Are you really sad? All the time?_

_I do grieve. But not any more than anybody else. I guess I’m bad at hiding it._

Seabirds swoop down over the cove for the first catch of the day.

What had she said?

_Whatever you all can do, I can do better._

Well, she wasn’t wrong.

* * *

_When it’s over, when they are still unsteady from the rush, he reaches across the bed for her hand, kisses the almost-translucent knuckles, the soft concave of her folded wrist. She pulls away, sits up to look back at him._

_Come away with me._

_Where to?_

_Anywhere. Wherever you want._

_Cersei shines: a hostile thing, hair crackling with charge, her spine a white column in the evening haze. Wishful thinking, she says._

_Why not?_

_Oh, you know._

_I don’t._

_I guess because of him, she admits. I won’t go back to him, of course. But it’s going to take some time to get us, us-as a unit- out of my system. Nowhere near ready to love yet. Not the kind you want, I think._

_He understands. But._

_But you can still come away. We won’t have to do this. It would be like before._

_You’d be a distraction!_

_I’ll blend into the crowds. You won’t even know. Make myself invisible._

_Cersei falls back upon the pillows. Looks at him, as if thinking up of something evil and absolutely inappropriate._

_I won’t suffer with you, she whispers, like letting him in on an obscene secret. You’ll only make me feel wonderful about it._

* * *

When he pressed further, she’d asked him to wait for her letter. So he did. It never came, though, which wasn’t altogether unexpected. _What were you thinking of?_

The first swimmers for the day are out. A mother and daughter. In matching polka dotted bathing suits straight out of a sepia postcard, very vintage, and very charming.

He walks back to his car. Thinks of visiting Cardiff sometime in the summer, of leaving flowers at Lyanna’s grave. She would love Galway, he decides.

 _What seas what shores what granite islands towards my timbers, and woodthrush calling through the fog_.

God, sometimes he wishes Cersei did write. That she did turn up at the station before him, with her jewel-hued bags and high piled hair and shamrock painted eyes. He tries to push it down.

In the end, Ned knows it’s better this way, to let go with grace, to accept that it’s not time yet. No reason why she should love him back. No reason why he should keep hoping for the alternative.

But good fucking hell, it hurts.

* * *

**Author's Note:**

> is this relevant to the prompt? idk. does it have a plot? idk. but did i feel satisfied after reading this? also idk.  
> about ixion: he was a mortal dude who tried to seduce hera and zeus lowkey snapped and pranked him into banging a clone hera. ned writes aan ixion poem cause he has thots and feels for cersei who is hera to rob's zeus.  
> also, yes ezra pound did do all the shit, yes seamus heaney did write a sexy poem about a sexy skunk, yes i hated killing lyanna and yes elia is a lesbian :))


End file.
